Its deep involvement in the Honda-Sony project illustrates Qualcomm’s burgeoning interest in the auto industry. The San Diego tech giant has become so adept at working on car technologies that it’s looking more like an automotive company, according to Bill Pinnell, vice president of product management for Qualcomm.
“We see the importance of diversity and moving away from a mobile-centric company, or purely mobile centric to have adjacent businesses that can use all the bits and pieces we already did with communications,” Pinnell told Automotive News.
“AI is super important, as are all the display graphics multimedia technologies that we’ve developed over the years, so the automotive part is a superset of nearly everything we do,” he said, noting that the Afeela is one of the few “devices” that uses all Qualcomm’s technologies in one, including the communications to the cloud and cloud infrastructure.
For the human-machine interface, Sony will use Qualcomm’s Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, a real-time 3D creation tool for visuals and immersive experiences, Pinnell said.
“That is taking what used to be gaming technology and putting it into the car,” he said. “Because as a car user, you want something that is going to delight you — you want eye candy.”
Pinnell said they call the screens inside the vehicle “wall-to-wall glass,” and Qualcomm is working on some of the high-end designs, such as the Mercedes-Benz 214, that require chip technology to drive more pixels than in an 8K screen.
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